Little Ferry BOE expands to two meetings per month

LITTLE FERRY - The Little Ferry Board of Education has expanded its schedule to two meetings per month in 2014 in order to hold working meetings at which the board can publicly discuss issues facing the district.

The BOE will not meet on the first and third Thursday of every month. The first meeting will be a work session with no action taken, while the regular meeting will on the third Thursday of each month, confirmed Little Ferry Superintendent Dr. Mark Hayes.

The work sessions will be a chance for the board to gather and discuss any issues at hand. Board President AJ Joshi said that when he began his tenure on the board, the BOE did hold work session meetings, but that they were cancelled along the way and that some board members expressed a desire to bring them back.

"When I started six years ago, we did schedule workshop sessions. We had them and then for whatever reason we cancelled them two or three years ago," said Joshi. "New board members this year and even some of the incumbents voiced a desire to have a workshop session so we could get some things done and we can discuss issues at hand."

Joshi stated that his vision for each workshop session to have each committee chair give a report on what the committee has discussed during their meetings and the report will give the opportunity to other board members to ask questions or make comments so that a discussion can be held if one is needed.

"There will be no action taken at these meetings," added Joshi. "But we need to have this option."

Joshi said that it would be easier to simply cancel a meeting if there was nothing that the board needed to meet to discuss rather than add extra meetings as needed.

"If there are no pressing issues or items to discuss, we can always cancel a meeting," Joshi said. "I think this way we can get more things accomplished."

By contrast, the BOE in Bogota, which held discussion over the course of two meetings to debate how often it should meet, has decided to shrink its meeting schedule down to once a month with the option of adding work session meetings as needed.

The measure narrowly passed by a 4-3 margin and supporters of the measure noted that extra meetings could be added during the busiest times of the year or simply when an important issue comes up that needs to be discussed.

Trustees that voted against the approval of one meeting per month cited the fact that there was a large amount of activity slated to take place during the coming year and that the BOE in Bogota previously tried to contract the meeting schedule and it often found itself with too many issues to discuss in one evening.